American Latino Theme Study

The Making of America National Park Service

This
essay explores actions taken by the United States government
during and after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and in response to
upheavals in several Central American countries, most notably El
Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua during the 1980s, that resulted in
significant increases in immigrants from those countries to the United
States.

Late-20th Century Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy: Forging Latino Identity in the Minefields of Political MemoryLillian Guerra

This
essay illuminates the often
dramatic differences in political perspective and general "visibility"
in U.S. culture that characterize Cold War Latinos by exploring the
ways in
which U.S. policy toward Central American and Caribbean regimes shaped
the
economic and political possibilities open to these countries before and
after
the Cold War. It also reveals the hidden challenges that many survivors
of Cold
War violence faced upon arrival in the United States as they and their
children
struggled to make sense of their experiences and find their place in a
society
that frequently denied, confused, or ignored their reasons for being
here. Although
most Central American refugees arrived as undocumented refugees in the
1980s
and subsequently spent years legalizing their status in order to
improve their
economic standing and gain greater political representation, Cubans who
arrived
in the 1960s and early 1970s became known for their unprecedented
economic
success compared with other Latinos and presumed unity behind
unchanging U.S. foreign
policy toward Castro's Cuba. However, even though Cubans have
continuously
benefitted from U.S. support for their immigration as part of a
long-standing
strategy to weaken the Communist regime in Cuba, Cuban communities have
also
become much more diverse than they are popularly perceived, especially
since
the 1980s and 1990s when tens of thousands of Cubans who experienced
revolutionary
Cuba brought more nuanced understandings of it and the Cold War with
them to
former enclaves founded by early wave "exiles" such as Miami.[1]
Indeed, these exiles' success in South Florida has made it a haven for
Cubans
of all generations, transforming Miami from a city dominated by white
Southerners (who constituted 79 percent of the population in 1970) to a
cultural
mecca for all Latinos and the city with the highest proportion of
foreign-born
residents nationwide, including thousands of Central Americans and
Haitians.[2]

Differences
in U.S. government support
for Caribbean and Central American refugees undoubtedly affected their
respective
ability to consolidate a cultural and political presence on the public
stage. Yet
with or without this support, it is clear that refugees of the Cold War
have successfully
forged distinctive Latino identities based on historically meaningful
memories
of trauma, survival, and resilience that continue to transform
political institutions,
federal policies toward disadvantaged groups, urban landscapes, and
cultural
understandings of what it means to be "American" in countless ways.

Ironically,
however, many foreign
policies ultimately responsible for the creation of new Latino
communities from
Central America and the Caribbean in the U.S. were meant to have the
opposite
effect. One of the best illustrations of this can be found in President
Ronald
Reagan's famous nationally televised address on U.S. foreign policy
toward the
region, delivered on May 9, 1984. Portraying the emergence of
revolutionary movements
across Central America as the result of Cuban-Soviet machinations
rather than
any homegrown political or economic factors, Reagan warned that
"Cuban-supported aggression" had already "forced more than
400,000 men, women, and children to flee their homes. And in all of
Central
America, more than 800,000 have fled..." Pinning the blame for
Nicaragua's recent revolution against the U.S.-backed Somoza
dictatorship on
Cuba's Fidel Castro, Reagan predicted that the refugee crisis would
only worsen
if the U.S. once again allowed Castro to "deceive Western public
opinion"
by fooling citizens into believing that any revolution against the
authoritarian
regimes of Central America would not
automatically lead to Communism. "Communist subversion," Reagan
argued, "poses the threat that a hundred million people from Panama to
the
open border of our South could come under the control of pro-Soviet
regimes,"
jeopardizing the U.S. way of life and hemisphere as a whole. In short,
Reagan
declared, "America is Central
America."[3]
The speech left little room to doubt either the logic or the merits of
Reagan's
primary goal: renewal of U.S. funding for military dictatorships in
Central
America with few, if any, conditions attached.

At
that very moment, the U.S. Congress
was seriously debating Reagan's demands with respect to El Salvador's
military-dominated
government.[4]
In the wake of Reagan's speech and the well-timed appeal of visiting
Salvadoran
President Jos&eacute Napole&oacuten Duarte, the U.S. Congress approved $196.6
million in
funding for El Salvador in the fiscal year of 1984 alone, a sum two and
a half
times greater than the year before; moreover, U.S. aid was no longer
contingent
on democratic reforms.[5]
Yet despite Reagan's promises that increasing aid would staunch the
flow of
refugees, his policy of providing unconditional support to a military
regime
best known for ordering wide-scale massacres of unarmed civilians and
selective
assassinations of Catholic clergy had the opposite effect: not only did
U.S. aid
to El Salvador promote the state terror that led hundreds of thousands
of civilians
to flee across Mexican and U.S. borders, but U.S. aid also ensured that
rampant
corruption among Salvadoran officials continued to go unchecked.[6]
By the late 1980s, the combination of war and graft had so crippled El
Salvador's
economy that President Duarte sent a personal appeal to President
Reagan that
he stopdeporting
thousands of undocumented Salvadoran refugees who found
sanctuary in the U.S. Without the hundreds of millions of dollars in
remittance
payments that these refugees sent their families every year, Salvadoran
society
would have ceased to function.[7]

Today,
it is clear that the
consistency of U.S. support for military regimes and dictatorships
across the
region of Central America and the Caribbean played a major role in the
creation
of diaspora communities across the U.S. that can trace their origins to
the
Cold War, a period that spanned the end of World War II through the
collapse of
the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. According to the 2010 U.S. Census,
Cubans
and Salvadorans compete for the top spot in terms of sheer numbers of
Cold War
era communities, with each community hovering around 1.7 million
nationwide. At
slightly over 1.4 million members, Dominicans come in third place, with
Guatemalans and Haitians close behind. Nicaraguans and Hondurans
constitute the
smallest of Latino communities who can trace their foundations to the
effects
of the Cold War in their home countries, numbering approximately
350,000 and
630,000 respectively. Although the vast majority of Cubans, Dominicans
and
Haitians settled in only one city (Cubans and Haitians in Miami;
Dominicans in
New York), Salvadorans, the second-largest group of Cold War Latinos
can be
found in almost equal numbers in Los Angeles, New York and our nation's
capital, Washington DC. [See Table below]

Salvadorans,
Cubans, Dominicans,
Guatemalans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans send billions of
dollars
annually to relatives and friends in their homelands. Contrary to
expectation,
the amount sent per group does not necessarily correspond to its
numeric size
or relative wealth. Indeed, Cubans, whose population and capital far
exceeds
that of Dominicans, Guatemalans, and Haitians, send roughly the same
amount
home: about one billion dollars a year since the mid-1990s. In all
cases,
national governments of these countries now count remittances as an
important
part of their countries' GDP, or Gross Domestic Product; without it,
their
economic and political stability would inevitably suffer.

Nonetheless,
most U.S. Americans, regardless of generation, remain profoundly
unaware of how
dramatically U.S. Cold War policy disrupted the lives and livelihood of
these
millions of Latinos from Central America and the Caribbean. As Juan
Romagoza
Arce, a former doctor who suffered torture and detention without charge
at the
hands of the Salvadoran military recalls of his arrival in the U.S., "I
was surprised by how little people knew
about what was happening outside their [borders]. People didn't know
too much
about the war in Central America – all they knew were 'communists' . .
.That
was a shock. Because I suffered the consequences" of U.S. policies."[8]

Indeed,
the rhetoric and logic of
U.S. policies, as typified by Reagan's 1984 speech, still represents
how much
of the U.S. public continues to understand the violence that consumed
the
countries of Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and the
Dominican
Republic from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. Fleeing "Communism" and not state terror or the generalized
climate of repression created, in part, by U.S. policies in the region,
also
remains the way in which most Central American and Caribbean
communities are
arguably perceived by the average U.S. American. Seen as indirect
victims of Soviet aggression rather
than refugees
of the U.S's alliance with national
aggressors,
Central Americans' and Caribbeans' complex, sometimes contentious views
of
their new adoptive home of the U.S. are often not only missed but also dismissed
by journalists, politicians, teachers, and neighbors as
confused, inaccurate or worse, "un-American."

All
figures from 2010 U.S. Census. The author gratefully thanks Christopher
Woolley
for his assistance in crafting this table.[9]

Living
History: The
United States' Long Cold War in Central America and the Caribbean

For
contemporary U.S. diasporas
of Central America and the Caribbean, the most burdensome legacy of
U.S. Cold
War policy may be living with the knowledge
of that history itself and not knowing what to do with it—how
to fit one's
country and one's personal experience into larger narratives about U.S.
democracy,
its commitment to human rights, the "American Dream," and the
victorious outcome over the Soviet Union in the Cold War that saturate
the
popular culture and mainstream discourse of today's U.S. There are
several reasons
for this disparity. One is simply that most U.S. educators and public
historians rely on history books that represent the Cold War as a
triumphalist
process that glosses the aim of U.S. foreign policy as simply
containing Soviet
designs.[10]
The denial of the U.S.'s record in Latin America is particularly
poignant for
the children of Latinos from Central America and the Caribbean who
frequently
encounter total silence in schools, museums, and the media on the
relationship
between the U.S.'s role in stoking the violence that gripped their home
countries
and the conditions that provoked their families' flight to the U.S.

Thirsting
for knowledge of their
countries' past and a way of relating it to the democratic values and
struggle
for cultural dignity that define them as U.S. Latinos, students at Los
Angeles'
Belmont High School recently developed a popular (and free) on-line
video game
called Tropical America. Their goal was to teach themselves and others
the
lessons and legacies of surviving hundreds of years of Spanish
colonialism as
well as dozens of non-representative republican governments, many of
which cooperated
with foreign investors and U.S. corporations, before and after the Cold
War, to
prevent tangible democratization.[11]
While these first-generation Latinos invented their own video game to
explain
the complexities of the U.S's Cold War in Latin America, most U.S.
teenagers
and young adults preferred the simpler story told by "Call of Duty:
Black
Ops", a widely marketed commercial video game in which players compete
to
reverse the U.S.'s Cold War "losses" in Cuba and elsewhere through
missions
such as assassinating Cuban leader Fidel Castro. As the game's
popularity
soared in 2011, many Cuban American parents were patently offended,
pointing
out that the game does not teach history but amnesia. Ironically, "Call
of
Duty" marked a rare case in which many Cubans in the U.S. and officials
of
the Cuban government could—and did—find total agreement.[12]

The
"Kill Castro"
scenario of "Call of Duty: Black Ops" as well as the game's now
blockbuster
status speaks volumes about the many factors that distort mainstream
views of
Central American and Caribbean history as well as the Cold War policies
that
produced unprecedented spikes in legal and illegal immigration from
this region.
These factors include the Castro-centric nature of public discourse
regarding
events in Latin America and the way in which early communities of Cuban
exiles
lined up their narratives of flight from Communism with the monolithic
interpretations
that U.S. officials derived from confrontations with revolutionary
Cuba.

In
part, the astounding ability
of what has become known as the "Cuban exile lobby" to restrain
changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba even as other barriers to normal
relations
with formal Cold War enemies like Vietnam collapsed can be traced to
the Reagan
era. Within a year of its organization, the exile-led Cuban American
National
Foundation became a primary advisor to the Reagan team on foreign
policy toward
Latin America, not just Cuba. Thus, Reagan's approach to El Salvador in
the May
1984 speech cited above echoed a larger tendency to reduce popular
revolutionary
movements in Central America and the Caribbean to the influence of one
man,
Fidel Castro. However, all U.S. Presidents after World War II, with the
exception
of Jimmy Carter, shared much of this view: that is, they interpreted
the
nationalist goals of movements that defied the power of local oligarchs
and
called for reforming economic models of development that benefitted
only elites
and foreign investors as the first step toward Communism and Soviet
control.[13]
This was especially true after 1959, when Cuba's revolutionary state
launched
an unprecedented attack on U.S. investments and the legitimacy of a
U.S. role
in Cuban political affairs.[14]

Not
only did a broadly popular
movement force Fulgencio Batista, a U.S.-supported dictator, from power
in
1959, but also within three years, the new government overturned the
previous
six decades of near constant U.S. military occupations, interventions,
and U.S.
ownership of the most lucrative parts of Cuba's national economy.[15]
Standoffs between the U.S. and Cuba emerged almost immediately in
January 1959
as the revolutionary government began to try, convict, and execute
hundreds of
officials and supporters of the Batista regime for "war crimes"
associated with the disappearance and assassination of thousands of
opponents
over the course of the Batista dictatorship (1952-59).

When U.S. officials protested the clear bias
of the trials and summary executions, their protests only lent greater
validity
to the process as millions of Cubans gathered in mass demonstrations to
defend
"revolutionary justice": why, Fidel Castro repeatedly asked, had the
same U.S. officials not issued similar protests when the tortured
corpses of civilians
still littered Cuba's streets only a few months earlier and Batista's
air force
was bombing peasant homes? Indeed, early popular support for repression
of opponents
facilitated the expansion of such methods and their reproduction over
the
course of the Revolution's first decade. Similar standoffs with the
U.S., a
rupture in diplomatic relations and U.S.-direction of the invasion at
the Bay
of Pigs created the pretext for the subsequent execution of hundreds of
counterrevolutionaries
and the jailing of tens of thousands more opponents and public critics,
many of
them former Castro supporters.".[16]

In
1961, Cuba became the only
society in Latin America where the U.S. was not present and not
welcome. Except
among former Batista supporters who had fled to Miami in 1959 and the
once
supportive Cuban middle class whose exodus to the U.S. reached its peak
between
1965 and 1972, Cuba's consolidation of national sovereignty seemed to
generate
an incalculable degree of empowerment and national pride among the
majority of
islanders.[17]
Even Fidel Castro's eventual embrace of socialism and the Soviet Union
only
hours before the disastrous CIA-directed invasion at the Bay of Pigs
strengthened most Cubans' faith in the Revolution's moral righteousness
vis a
vis U.S. efforts at subversion. [18]

As
historian Thomas Paterson has
argued, U.S. officials' unflinching preoccupation with determining if
Fidel was
a Communist or not rendered them incapable of recognizing the critical
role of
anti-imperialist nationalism that Fidel tapped among the Cuban people
and that
he himself came to embody.[19]
Subsequently, the primary lesson that U.S. officials drew from Cuba was
not that dictators like Batista and
repeated
U.S. violations of national sovereignty promoted radical politics and
anti-imperialist sentiment by repressing moderates and discrediting
compromise;
rather, it was that radical politics and "anti-American" sentiment
provoked
and justified the repression of moderates and the discrediting of
compromise.

Thus,
over the next three
decades, stagnant and largely ineffective policies of isolating Cuba
and
attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro went hand-in-hand with
unconditional
support for "kleptocratic" dictatorships like that of the Duvaliers
in Haiti, the Somoza family in Nicaragua, and the Balaguer regime in
the Dominican
Republic.[20]
Periodically, these dictators' talent for embezzling foreign aid often
exceeded
their propensity to kill or intimidate opponents.[21]
Nonetheless, these dictatorships produced just as many immigrants
seeking political
refuge as Castro's Cuba: indeed, because most opposition activists in
countries
like Haiti and the Dominican Republic hailed from the middle and
educated
classes, the first waves of immigrants to arrive in the 1960s coincided
with
Cuban exiles in terms of timing as well as social background. Where
they
differed was in their attitude toward the U.S. and the aid they
received from
federal agencies: Dominicans and Haitians were, after all, fleeing the
violence
of regimes that the U.S. supported while Cubans were fleeing the U.S's
primary
enemy, revolutionary Cuba. That most U.S. Americans might have
inaccurately perceived
Dominicans, Haitians, and other immigrants from Cold War hot spots in
the
region as "economic refugees" rather than political refugees on the
order of Cuban exiles is not surprising. In many ways, such a view
derived
easily from U.S. officials' public statements and the belief that if
the U.S.
supported them, right-wing military regimes opposed to Communism could
simply not produce political
refugees.

At
the same time, U.S. Cold War
policies of preventing "other Cubas" by supporting authoritarian
states—regardless of the means they employed—simply reinforced a deeply
embedded
pattern in the region that predated the Cold War. Until World War II,
U.S. companies
operated hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to thwart the
possibility that national
states might pass laws favoring local capitalists' interests and/or
workers'
rights to the detriment of foreign businesses. U.S. companies
frequently
achieved this by securing concessions that gave them monopolies on
trade, production,
infrastructure, and control over workers on massive estates.[22]
Through such means, the United Fruit Company (popularly known as El Pulpo, "the Octopus") became
a ubiquitous and infamous presence across Latin America as well as the
largest
landowner in Guatemala, Cuba, and other places.[23]
In its efforts to prevent unionization, the United Fruit Company also
recruited
contract workers extensively across the Caribbean, creating racially
and
nationally mixed diasporas in plantations from Costa Rica, Panama, and
Honduras
to Cuba and Jamaica. Galvanized by a work experience that often made
them
proficient in multiple languages and radical proponents of labor
rights, thousands
of United Fruit workers made their way to cities such as New Orleans,
Mobile,
and New York as early as the 1910s. There, former United Fruit workers
such as
Marcus Garvey championed black pride and social justice, forever
transforming
the nature and direction of U.S. civil rights struggles in the 20th
Century.[24]

Often,
U.S. investments in Latin
America depended on the U.S.'s reliance on military interventions and
occupations that protected those investments and often, the local
political
status quo. Thus, the U.S. carried out military occupations of the
Dominican
Republic (1916-1924), Nicaragua (1926-1934), Haiti (1915-1934) as well
as
repeated interventions in Cuba, including two military occupations
(1898-1902;
1906-1909) and support for at least two coups by sectors of Cuba's
U.S.-trained
national army (1933 and 1952). Despite officials' justifications of
intervention in the name of fomenting democracy and generalized
prosperity, U.S.
military occupations did not lead to democratic regimes and more
inclusionary
national economies. On the contrary, in the countries that experienced
them,
U.S. military occupations led to some of the longest standing and
bloodiest dictatorships
in the world, including that of Anastasio Somoza whose family ruled
Nicaragua
from 1936-1979 and Rafael Trujillo who ruled the Dominican Republic
from
1930-1961. Both were star pupils of U.S. Marine training schools and
the first
chiefs of the "National Guards" that replaced U.S. forces when they
withdrew.[25]
In Cuba, two-time dictator Fulgencio Batista began his political career
in 1933
as the U.S.'s handpicked alternative to a revolutionary government that
passed
a slate of democratic reforms and repealed the Platt Amendment, a
U.S.-imposed
constitutional mandate that had allowed the U.S. to intervene
militarily on behalf
of U.S. interests since 1902.

Needless
to say, ignorance about
the history of U.S. interventions in the political and economic
development of
these countries before and after the start of the Cold War in 1948 can be astounding to those who live
with the
legacies of those interventions. Cases in point include that of
Guatemala whose
democratically elected government was toppled by the CIA five years before the Cuban Revolution for
attempting
to carry out a much needed agrarian reform because that reform targeted
U.S. investments,
especially the United Fruit Company. The Guatemalan government
therefore constituted
a "Communist menace," despite its unprecedented electoral validation
and
popularity in a country where universal suffrage and fair elections had
been
unknown less than a decade before.[26]

One
legacy can be tallied in the
number of human lives lost to the repressive policies of the
dictatorships and
military regimes that dominated five of these six countries from the
1950s
through the 1990s; another lies in the vast waves of refugees that
U.S.-financed policies of state terror and counterinsurgency warfare
produced
at the same time. Counting just the countries of Central America
characterized
by U.S.-backed military regimes and outright counterinsurgency wars
targeting
civilians, the totals are devastating: Nicaragua lost more than 80,000,
of whom
more than 30,000 died in the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against a
revolutionary
regime in the 1980s; in El Salvador and Guatemala respectively, 75,000
and
200,000 were killed or disappeared.[27]
According to the United Nations' brokered truth commissions, which
formed a key
part of peace negotiations in all three cases, U.S.-trained armed
forces were responsible
for the vast majority of deaths and atrocities. In the case of El
Salvador,
state terror accounted for 85 percent of deaths and abuses.[28]
In Guatemala, the commission found the state responsible for 93 percent
of
atrocities; it also qualified military strategies against Mayan Indians
as
genocidal because they accounted for 83 percent of all killed.[29]
In addition, two million fled Central America,

In
Haiti, where the Duvalier
dynasty ruled from 1957 to 1986, state terror killed an estimated
30,000 to
50,000 civilians under Papa Doc's reign alone (1957-1971) with an
additional
90,000 Haitians seeking refuge in the U.S. from the 1960s through the
1970s.[30]
Tens of thousands more would die under Baby Doc as well as the multiple
coups
and counter-coups that followed his 1986 flight from power. The
shattering of
democratic hopes and ever-worsening economic conditions in the 1990s
eventually
produced a diaspora in the U.S. of Haitians that numbers just under one
million
today.[31]

Dominicans
also fled the terror
that followed the 1961 assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo as
Joaquín
Balaguer, Trujillo's former Vice President, and Trujillo's military
struggled
to contain the radical impulses of the country's long repressed
citizenry. At
first, the U.S. Embassy refused visas for Dominicans seeking asylum
from the
political terror that Balaguer unleashed because of their presumably
radical
political credentials; however, in 1965, it reversed course. By then, a
U.S. military
occupation had toppled a popularly installed revolutionary government
from
power and reasserted the authority of former Dominican military allies,
including
Joaquín Balaguer. Immigration visas thus became an additional weapon in
the U.S.'s
counterinsurgency arsenal because allowing political activists to
escape
"neo-trujillista" reprisals by Balaguer's death squads acted as a
safety valve for radicalization. Ironically, escape to the country most
Dominicans blamed for the thirty-year Trujillo dictatorship and the
violence
that followed helped to dissipate the possibilities for re-organizing
revolutionary
forces. U.S. officials assumed that any reorganization of nationalist
activism
would undermine U.S. power and embolden other societies to imitate
their example.[32]

In
all cases except the Dominican
Republic and Cuba where the granting of visas complemented U.S. foreign
policy
until the early 1970s, most of those fleeing state terror and political
violence for the U.S. were undocumented upon arrival. Subsequently,
refugees
who applied for a legalization of their status encountered pronounced
discrimination
on the part of U.S. immigration and Naturalization Services [INS]based
on the
contention that they were economically motivated, exaggerating claims
of
individual repression or simply unable to "prove" that they would
suffer persecution if returned to their homeland, however obvious the
condition
of generalized violence.[33]
For certain groups at the height of conflict, such as Salvadorans and
Guatemalans
in the 1980s, the political reasoning behind INS denials of claims for
asylum
had everything to do with U.S. Cold War policy toward their homelands.

Since
the late 1960s, the
Salvadoran military had increasingly relied on U.S. training and
diplomatic
support to prevent any substantive reforms and thereby preserve a tiny
elite's
control over the national economy through a vast campaign of political
violence.
[34]
By 1980, that campaign had expanded far beyond its original targeting
of
left-wing guerrillas and unarmed activists to attack thousands of
civilians, including
students, professors, doctors, international aid workers, a
disproportionately
high number of peasants as well as dozens of Catholic laypeople, nuns,
and
priests.[35]
Most famously, in March 1980, the head of El Salvador's national
security
agency ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a
vociferous
critic of U.S. aid; the military then fired on the 30,000 mourners who
gathered
for his funeral, killing dozens.[36]
The military went as far as to threaten the entire Jesuit order with
"extermination" and famously abducted, raped, and killed four U.S.
church
women, three of them nuns, on the presumption that their work with the
poor
made them allies of left-wing guerrillas.[37]
In the first four years of Reagan's presidency alone, the military
murdered
between eight to nine thousand civilians per year; the Salvadoran
government
ordered not a single investigation of their deaths.[38]

Not
surprisingly, as legal
scholar Michael H. Posner noted at the time, it was extremely difficult
for the
U.S. to admit tens of thousands of refugees and "thus acknowledge
political persecution by the government of El Salvador, and yet ask
Congress to
certify more military assistance to that country based on significant
human
rights improvements of the refugee's government."[39]

Indeed,
from June 1983 to
September 1990, only 2.6 percent Salvadoran and 1.8 percent Guatemalan
asylum
seekers succeeded.[40]
In the case of Haitian refugees where a related, although highly
racialized
logic applied, only eleven of
22,940
Haitians intercepted at sea were deemed qualified to apply for
political asylum
between 1981 and 1990. Three years later, after the Bush administration
sanctioned another bloody coup, this time against the democratically
elected
government of Jean-Bertrande Aristide, only 11,000 Haitians of 38,000
who
attempted to enter the U.S. were granted the right to apply for
political
asylum. The U.S. Coast Guard returned the rest to Haiti.[41]
Surprisingly, refugees from Nicaragua did not necessarily benefit from
INS largesse
despite the fact that they were displaced by a civil war that pitted
the
country's revolutionary government troops against the Contras, an army
organized by the CIA, led by former somocista
National Guardsmen and financed by the U.S.[42]
Only 9 to 11 percent of Nicaraguan refugees were granted asylum until
1985-1987
when Reagan's drive for massive aid to the Contras resulted in a spike
in approvals
as high as 84 percent. Once Congress cut off aid again, however, levels
dropped
to their previous rates.[43]

By
contrast, Cubans or applicants
from Eastern bloc countries enjoyed near automatic entrance to the U.S.[44]
Cubans, who had benefitted from U.S. State Department visa waivers in
the early
years of the Revolution, subsequently enjoyed automatic permanent
residency
status and additional benefits such as food, cash allotments,
Cubans-only
educational programs, and other privileges never extended to other
immigrants
or minority groups based on the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act and the
two-billion-dollar Cuban Refugee Program that provided unprecedented
federal
support to individual refugees as well as schools, businesses, and
state agencies
attending them until 1980.[45]
Although Cubans arriving by sea must make landfall to avoid deportation
since
1994, U.S. law has continued to consider virtually anyone who wants to
leave
Cuba a "political refugee," no questions asked. As María de los Angeles
Torres explains, "For the U.S. government, Cuban &eacutemigr&eacutes provided the
rationale for continuing a foreign policy aimed at containing communism
and expanding
the forces needed for battle."[46]
On this basis, nearly one million Cubans were admitted, with 20,000
more arriving
every year through a U.S.-sponsored visa lottery and thousands of
others by
land and sea in the post-Cold War era.

Undoubtedly,
Cuban exiles and
those of more recent migrations struggle with unique traumas associated
with
living under the domain of a Communist state that has tolerated little
if any
dissent and an official political culture that, until recently,
identified
anyone who left or wanted to leave as a traitor, sell-out, escoria (scum), and even "anti-cubano."
Many exiles of the 1960s lived with memories of having suffered public
humiliation at the hands of proponents and agents of Castro's popular
revolutionary
regime. In the weeks before a family departed, government ministries
carried
out inventories of their home and forced them to pay for any goods that
did not
appear at the time of the final inspection: they were effectively
charged with
having "stolen" their own property from "the people". Those
leaving after 1962 could no longer take anything with them except $5
and a
small suitcase carrying the barest necessities. Years later, the
strongest
memory that some exiles carry with them is not of leaving their
relatives behind
but of being treated like common criminals at the Havana airport.
Charged with
inspecting departing "gusanos"
for hidden cach&eacutes of diamonds or jewels, militia men and women
inspected body
orifices; for men, this meant the anal cavity and for women, the vagina.[47]

Caught
up in a "class
war" for which most exiles felt they were not responsible, Cuban exiles
bonded with one another in the famously all-Cuban enclaves of Little
Havana and
Hialeah in Miami Dade County, re-establishing the newspapers and small
businesses
that they had lost in Cuba and refounding the many Catholic schools to
which
they had sent their children. While the wealthiest exile elite,
including a majority
of batistianos (former Batista
supporters),
recreated racially segregated institutions like the Havana Yacht Club
(renamed
the Havana Yacht Club in Exile) and exclusive lily-white neighborhoods
like Miramar,
working-class and middle-class Cubans killed and roasted whole pigs in
their
backyards, bought land to grow traditional Cuban foods for local
markets, and
opened up grocery stores and restaurants for other Cubans.

Yet
for Cubans of all social
classes, Miami was not necessarily a welcoming place in the 1960s and
early
1970s when nearly half a million refugees first arrived. Indeed, the
display of
"For Rent" signs in Miami that also read "No Children, No Pets
and No Cubans" became a legendary example of the hostility that greeted
many early refugees.[48]
Because Miami's schools, beaches, and public spaces were still racially
segregated, thousands of Cubans—whom local whites perceived as
non-white
however the Cubans themselves may have identified—courageously defied
racial
and cultural barriers en masse. Indeed, African-Americans "watched in
disbelief"
as Cuban black and mulatto children attended formally all-white
schools, together
with their racially mixed and Hispanic Cuban compatriots.[49]

Forced
to accommodate thousands
of Spanish-speaking Cuban children and hundreds of highly qualified, if
uncertified, Cuban teachers, Miami's public schools expanded wildly.
Between
1960 and 1965, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare
established
teacher training programs to jumpstart the certification of Cuban
teachers,
created the country's first federally funded bilingual schools, opened
vocational
training courses for adults, launched Cuban-specific college loan
programs and
found jobs for the hundreds of University of Havana professors who had
settled
in Miami Dade County.[50]
Cubans also received cash relief at levels much higher than native
residents
and became the first beneficiaries of government-surplus food.[51]
Perhaps most ingenious was the "Training for Independence" program,
targeted specifically at Cuban single-mothers and unmarried women in
Miami who
depended on relief. Offering intensive English-language classes and job
training, the mandatory program was so successful that it became a
model for welfare
assistance projects nationwide.[52]

Undoubtedly,
the symbolic
competition between the U.S. and the Soviet bloc during the Cold War
inspired
much of the creativity and generosity behind these federal programs.
Yet their
success in aiding Cubans adjust and succeed ultimately helped justify
the
claims of other minorities, not just other Latinos, for similar kinds
of
federal support as well as policies that would promote
multi-culturalism, not
simply assimilation. Indeed, while Cubans were the principal
beneficiaries of
the Cuban Refugee Program, the hundreds of millions of dollars it
pumped into
South Florida schools, infrastructure and economy indirectly benefitted
the
whole regional economy, increasing tourism, and catalyzing a long-term
real
estate boom. Despite this, Miami's self-described "Anglos" led the
U.S.'s
first English-only movement in 1980 that eventually amended the Florida
Constitution
to specify English as the official language of the state in 1988. In
response,
Cubans mobilized to defeat the Democratic politicians responsible for
the
amendment by registering to vote. Overwhelming the electorate in sheer
numbers,
Cubans ultimately overturned the amendment in 1993 and permanently
established
the character of Florida as a place that values bilingualism and
promotes pride
in Spanish fluency.[53]
As one Cuban writer has put it, "the Miami of today can hardly be
compared
to any city in the Cuba we remember...[However, in Miami]an exile
has a
choice to be one, the other, or both [Latino and American], and to
communicate
using English, Spanish or both languages—this is a key point."[54]

Today,
any Latino resident of
Miami would likely agree with this sentiment and the reasons extend far
beyond
Cubans' struggle to preserve their language. While Cubans faced
cultural and racial
marginalization for the first twenty to thirty years of their
settlement in
Miami, the most Cuban-identified areas of Miami are now the most
culturally integrated
by other Latino refugees, especially those from Central America,
despite the
array of public monuments and markers designating these areas as
historically
and culturally Cuban. "Calle Ocho" (or Eighth Street) in Little
Havana provides a case in point. There, restaurants such as "Fritanga
Erika"
promise Nicaraguan food with Cuban flare and "Caf&eacute Latina" advertises
Central American fusion alongside authentic Cuban espresso. Even iconic
spaces,
long ago declared Florida Heritage Sites, have broadened the cultural
identities
and histories that they celebrate, to include far more than Cubans. For
example,
a large, painted mural featuring the images of Latin American leaders
gathered
at a summit in Miami during the Clinton administration flanks one side
of the
Parque Máximo G&oacutemez, a small park where elderly Cuban men and women
have
gathered to play dominoes and talk politics since 1976. Calle Ocho also
features a Hollywood-style walk of fame on its sidewalk with virtually
as many
Latin American entertainment stars as Cubans. A few blocks away,
Cafetería
Guardabarranco's colorful mural also announces the unity of Cubans with
other
Latinos. One end features the faces of Afro-Cuban musician Celia Cruz,
Puerto Rican
bandleader Tito Puente, Mexican American Selena and Argentina's Carlos
Gardel;
the other end highlights the visages of Latin America's most famous
nationalists
alongside a bustling scene of traditional village life and the phrase, "¡Viva Nuestra Raza!" [Long
live our race!].

Still,
despite these clear signs
of solidarity and inclusion, Little Havana remains the symbolic heart
of
official exile narratives about their place in the U.S.'s Cold War
past. Erected
through local fundraising efforts and maintained by the combined
efforts of
city government and vigilant residents, historical monuments punctuate
the area.
A monument featuring the Virgin of Charity, Cuba's patron saint,
announces
Miami Cubans' commemoration of the one-hundred-year anniversary of
Cuba's last
war for independence against Spain with no mention of the U.S.'s
fateful intervention
of 1898 in the war and Cuban patriots' subsequent struggle to rid the
island of
a four-year-long U.S. military occupation: indeed, the monument gives
the impression
that none of these things ever happened. Similarly, Little Havana's
monument to
Cuban exile "martyrs" at the Bay of Pigs calls the event an "assault"
rather than the more familiar U.S. term of "invasion" or "operation."
Most bizarre of all is a monument to Manolo Fernández, "El
Caballero del Tango" [The Knight
of the Tango], which features a dedication by its chief funder,
Gilberto Casanova,
whom a plaque describes as the Secretary of Acci&oacuten Cubana, or "Cuban
Action."
Founded in the early 1970s by Cuban exile extremists in protest of what
they
perceived as the softening of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America
and
growing complacency among fellow exiles toward Castro, Acci&oacuten Cubana
claimed
responsibility for the bombings of dozens of Cuban embassies and
consulates
throughout Latin America.[55]

These
monuments speak to the
minefield of memory in which Cubans of different generations have
forged their
identity in South Florida. The region's political culture developed in
tandem
with two, largely unique processes: first, the development of
unprecedented programs
of covert and overt subversion by national security agencies to topple
and undermine
the Cuban government led by Fidel Castro; and second, the development
of equally
unprecedented programs of direct legal, educational, and financial aid
to Cuban
refugees that no other immigrant or minority group has ever enjoyed.
The former
initially entailed easy employment in the world's largest CIA station
at the
University of Miami. Endowed with an annual budget of $50 million a
year, the
CIA hired a staff of 400 agents and over ten to fifteen thousand
informants,
saboteurs, and self-appointed political saviors drawn from the early
ranks of Cuban
exiles.[56]
In addition, the CIA's funding of front businesses in Miami ensured
that
certain Cuban exiles enjoyed a "subsidized" and financially guaranteed
version of the American Dream while Anglo-owned businessmen and all
others
simply had to fend for themselves.[57]
Until 1980 when the much darker, much more working-class marielitos
arrived, Cubans also enjoyed a variety of advantages in
their public image thanks to a sympathetic U.S. media that usually
depicted
them as white, educated, and affluent, all qualities that mattered in a
still
highly segregated U.S. culture, even though in most cases, Cubans did
not necessarily
fit the bill. Moreover, their access to public funds facilitated by
agencies of
the U.S. government ensured that, among other privileges, Cubans gained
greater
access to federally funded loans in comparison to Dominicans, Puerto
Ricans,
and African-Americans.[58]

Cubans
of subsequent generations
who grew up in Miami continue to prosper from the historically
accumulated advantages
that their parents and grandparents' utility to U.S. foreign policy
granted
them. But Cubans were not just beneficiaries of U.S. policy, they were
also its
victims. From the 1960s through the early 1990s, paramilitary groups
based in
Miami not only launched raids on Cuba with the support of the CIA; they
also
attempted to silence those Cuban exiles who favored dialogue with and
travel to
the island. The paramilitary groups used selective assassinations,
death
threats, and bombings of post offices, banks, the airport, an
exile-owned art
gallery, Miami's FBI headquarters, and other institutions to intimidate
their
fellow exiles. Testifying to the deep connections that Cuban exiles
enjoy at
the centers of power, no group or individual was ever charged with
these
crimes.[59]

U.S.
intelligence agencies'
willingness to either sponsor or tolerate illegal and criminal methods
employed
by right-wing exile groups to police the attitudes, public speech, and
political positions of other Cubans and Cuban-Americans has played a
key role
in maintaining U.S. policy toward Cuba on a wartime footing. It has
also fomented
a culture of political "intolerance" in South Florida, especially Miami.[60]
As a result, individual Cubans and Cuban-Americans who disagree with
exile
points of view on U.S. policy toward Cuba or question key aspects of
the exile
narrative on the Cuban Revolution (most commonly portrayed as an event
that never
needed to have happened) often encounter hostility, name-calling, job
discrimination,
arguments with friends, and relatives as well as overt forms of
intimidation.[61]

Importantly,
Cubans who most
disagree with the U.S. embargo and travel ban on Cuba today are not
registered
to vote.[62]
Equally important is the overwhelming support for change in U.S.
foreign policy
toward Cubans among Florida's Cuban community, despite the public
positions
taken by Cuban exiles and Cuban American elected officials, both
locally and
nationally. According to a Florida International University Cuba Study
Group
poll, conducted regularly since 1991, the percentage of Cubans favoring
the
re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S.
reached 58
percent in 2011.[63]

The
contradiction in positions
between elected representatives and the Cuban community that elects
them on the
issue of U.S.-Cuban relations remains difficult to explain. Fear of
rejection
by one's community as a Castro sympathizer and the apathy that
over-politicization of life in both Cuba
and among Cuban communities in the U.S. undoubtedly play a role. Yet
despite
the tensions with which Cubans live in the U.S., their numeric
concentration in
primarily one spot and their relatively high visibility in public
consciousness
gives Cubans an organizational advantage when it comes to representing
their interests
and identity at the local and national level.

By
contrast, other Latinos who
trace their community's origins to Cold War struggles in their home
countries
find themselves geographically fragmented across multiple cities in the
U.S.
and far less empowered at all levels, culturally, politically, and
economically—in
part, because they largely arrived as undocumented refugees. Ignored by
the mainstream
media or simply "generalized" into the pan-ethnic category of Latino
with little analysis of what makes each group's culture and politics
different,
other refugees from Central America and the Caribbean often feel
frustrated by
the invisibility of their culture and the Castro-centrism that tends to
pervade
public representations of the Cold War. Getting beyond this
Castro-centrism
involves understanding how stories of trauma, survival, and recovery
have woven
themselves into the process of identity building among these Latino
communities
and members' everyday lives.

Getting
Beyond Castro-Centrism: Living the Legacy of Political Violence and
Torture among Central Americans

How
do Salvadorans or Guatemalans
in the U.S. who suffered brutal forms of torture and mass terror at the
hands
of state security forces in the 1980s and 1990s talk
about their society's ordeal in a cultural context that fails
to recognize that it even happened? How do they explain to their
friends and
neighbors their fear of visiting their homelands where, for the most
part, the
military officers responsible for atrocities not only enjoy near-total
impunity
but have remained critical players in their current government's
post-war "democratic"
regimes? For years, Juan Romagoza Arce, a Salvadoran survivor of
torture, asked
himself such questions everyday. One way he responded to them was to
courageously
challenge the officials responsible for his torment, El Salvador's
Minister of Defense
and Chief of the National Guard, in U.S. federal courts. Awarded
multiple honors
by U.S. officials, the generals had retired to South Florida where they
led
normal lives until Romagoza and two other Salvadorans won their case
against
the men in 2002.[64]
When the court's ruling was repeatedly upheld under appeal, Romagoza
then
joined new litigants in launching another successful case, this time in
Memphis,
Tennessee, against Colonel Nicolás Carranza, El Salvador's former Vice
Minister
of Defense and Public Security who oversaw the National Guard and
National Police.[65]
These cases represent enormous symbolic victories for survivors of
torture everywhere,
as their lawyers at the Center for Justice and Accountability based in
San
Francisco made clear.

Every
case and investigation
draws communities in Central America and the U.S. together in a process
of
survival and healing that helps younger generations share the
historical witness
that often mark their parents and grandparents' perspectives. While the
experience
may unite and strengthen Central Americans' transnational identity, it
is unclear
what effect it may have on uninformed or disinterested mainstream U.S.
Americans
in the U.S. Judging from the testimony delivered at the time of the
Salvadoran
generals' landmark trial, not only did plaintiffs have to educate judge
and
jury as to the nature of their abuse, but they also had to battle the
deeply ingrained
discourse for which Reagan became so famous, that is, of equating
Central American
counterinsurgency methods with "freedom-fighting." Attesting to this
in the 2002 case, the defense attorney, in his closing remarks,
compared the
Salvadoran generals responsible for the atrocities civilians suffered
to Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams.[66]

Romagoza
and his fellow plaintiffs'
victories represent one of many instances where victims of Salvadoran
and Guatemalan
government atrocities have sought redress transnationally, that is,
either in
U.S. courts or through the aid of international human rights activists
and even
historians based in the U.S. These instances, perhaps more than other
examples,
have helped make the presence and story of Central American migration
more visible
and relevant to the U.S. public. For Guatemalans who can afford it or
have ties
to U.S. institutions in the U.S., trying security agents responsible
for individual
deaths of relatives in U.S. courts has also become a means for
contesting the
impunity enjoyed by former military officers-turned-politicians, such
as
General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala's dictator of the early 1980s whom
the
United Nations accused of genocide.[67]
Addressing the Guatemalan military's strategies against largely rural
Mayan communities
has also entailed transnational cooperation in excavating bodies from
massacre
sites as well unearthing critical documents. In 2005, historians
discovered a
secret police archive containing 30,000 files of citizens arrested and
disappeared
during the 1980s. In its analysis and preservation, Guatemalan
historians and
U.S. historians of Guatemala like Greg Grandin have played a vital role.[68]

Nonetheless,
Central American
refugees, like many Haitians, face the daily paradox of having sought
refuge in
the very society that many blame for the extent of the violence that
they
suffered in their homelands. Many also face the equally paradoxical
reality of
having fought deportation from the U.S. for years on the charge that
they were
not "real" political refugees but economic migrants, seeking jobs not
sanctuary in the U.S. Incredibly, hundreds of former generals and other
top security
officers responsible for war crimes often found easy routes to
permanent
residency and eventual citizenship. For many, the INS's apparent
preference for
deporting illegal immigrants from Central America, even if they were
victims of
human rights abuses, was not only complemented by a willingness to aid
and abet
known abusers, but a policy of helping them coverup past crimes.[69]
According to Amnesty International, about 400,000 survivors of
politically orchestrated
torture live in the U.S. and about 1,000 alleged torturers live among
them, including
many from Haiti, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.[70]
During the course of conflict and afterward, solidarity networks
linking
Catholic-led organizations such as Witness for Peace as well as
non-profit
Latino organizations such as La Peña in Berkeley and the Esperanza
Peace and
Justice Center in San Antonio played pivotal roles in helping Cold War
refugees
find sanctuary, help, and advice in making the transition to life in
the U.S.

Violence
has nonetheless remained
a permanent part of life for many Central Americans who live in poor
neighborhoods,
especially in Los Angeles where young Salvadoran gang members govern
key
aspects of the drug trade, just as they do in San Salvador. In
explaining the
emergence of the gangs, many analysts point to the role played by child
soldiers
in the Salvadoran war, particularly those forcibly recruited into the
state military
ranks where they witnessed and carried out torture and corporal
mutilation. In
order to solve a deficit in the number of recruits, military forces
regularly
kidnapped individual boys as they were walking to school, running
errands or
playing; they also raided middle schools, abducting into their ranks
whole classrooms
or all the boys in particular grades.[71]
Of the government's troops, 80 percent were under the age of eighteen,
with
most averaging 14-15 years old at the time of their incorporation. By
contrast,
30 percent of guerrillas were minors.[72]
Often orphaned by army offensives, they joined the guerrillas out a
desire to
avenge their dead family members or because they had no one to care for
them
and therefore no other choice.[73]
Recently, Central American gangs have garnered increasing attention in
the U.S.
media, especially as former guerrilla commanders, Catholic Church
authorities
and Homies Unidos, a Los Angeles-based gang intervention project,
prepare to broker
a truce among gang members from California to El Salvador in May 2012.[74]

Unfortunately,
few would contend
that knowledge of their wartime roots plays a role in how most young
gang members
are perceived. The scars that they carry are as invisible as those
carried by
older immigrants and migrants, despite the fact that in recent years,
the U.S. Federal
Government has taken remarkable steps to recognize and deal with the
trauma
that the legacies of torture can inflict on families and communities,
often for
years. Such steps include the funding of clinics meant to treat torture
victims
and the Healing Club, a support group in Los Angeles for torture
victims and
their families. The club forms part of two dozen little-known,
federally funded
torture rehabilitation programs in the U.S.[75]

The
attention of Federal Government
agencies and legal victories over human rights abusers clearly have
made Central
Americans know that they are not alone in burdening the costs and the
knowledge
of history that they bear. Such a shift forms part of a larger process
of
empowerment that has clearly emerged in the last fifteen years as the
majority
of first-wave Central American refugees legalized their status and
thereby, increased
their political activism on behalf of community needs, fielded
candidates for
political office, and became key players in transnational efforts to
subvert
official silences in their homelands.[76]
For example, María Teresa Tula, leader of the human rights group known
as
Co-Madres that Archbishop Romero founded in San Salvador shortly before
he was
assassinated, came to the U.S. as an undocumented refugee in 1987
despite the
fact that Co-Madres had received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Award three
years earlier. However, Tula's long-standing ties to peace activists in
the U.S.
and U.S. academics who sponsored speaking tours in which Tula shared
her story
ultimately served to bring her and other Salvadorans' struggle to
greater public
consciousness. A transcript of María Teresa Tula's life history,
published in
1999, quickly became and remains a bestselling textbook in U.S.
colleges
nationwide.[77]
Moreover, from her home in the U.S., Tula and the Co-Madres
successfully led an
alliance of NGOs that pressured the Salvadoran government to create the
country's
principal war memorial in 2003. Modeled on the Vietnam War Memorial in
Washington, "The Wall" in San Salvador's central Cuscatlán Park
conmemorates
the thousands of dead and disappeared at the hands of the Salvadoran
military.

Although
even the largest
Salvadoran community in Los Angeles does not yet boast its own
monuments, it
has scored several recent victories in gaining official recognition and
support
for public sites honoring Salvadoran history and presence. In 2000, the
Salvadoran American National Association partnered with Catholic
parishes in
Los Angeles to commission a replica of the nation's revered sacred
image of
Jesus Christ, Divine Savior, which normally resided in San Salvador's
cathedral.
Highly symbolic of so many refugees' own perilous journey, the statue
left El
Salvador on a pilgrimage through Guatemala and Mexico before finally
arriving
at the Dolores Mission Church.[78] In 2009, Cal
State Northridge, the General Consulate of El
Salvador in Los Angeles,
and Museo
de la
Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador sponsored
a series of multimedia events at the Los Angeles Theatre
Center called "Preservacion
de la Memoria Historica Salvadorena" (Salvadoran
Preservation of Historic
Memory). Meant to address "the civil war's haunting legacy while
looking
toward the future of Salvador's people, at home and abroad," the
program
included a photo exhibit, a symposium on historic memory, discussions
of
Salvadoran writers, and theatrical presentations celebrating indigenous
heritage.
In explaining his motivations for staging the festival William Flores,
director
of Olin
Theater Presenters,
noted, "Memory is something that mustn't be lost...To kill memory is
to
kill the human being."[79]

Salvadorans
in Los Angeles have
also found new sites to anchor, cultivate, and restore their much
ravaged
memory and cultural knowledge in a section of Vermont Avenue known
designated
as the El Salvador Community Corridor. Although it already boasts
twenty-five
restaurants and eighty other Salvadoran-owned businesses, the area
still lacks
the murals, monuments, and museums that typify historic districts such
as
Little Havana's Calle Ocho. Moreover, while a plaza in the corridor was
named
for the Salvadoran patriot and spiritual hero Archbishop Oscar Romero,
it might
soon compete with another commemorative space also named for Romero if
a group
of Salvadoran leaders succeeds in renaming MacArthur Park in the fall
of 2012.[80]

As
this essay shows, the struggle
for greater political representation and prosperity that arguably all
immigrants face was notably complicated in the case of Cold War Latinos
by the
complex and contradictory history that led to their presence in the
U.S. Their
ability and willingness to forge a public identity and image for
themselves has
also been undercut by the ways in which memories of that history remain
buried,
distorted, or simply unknown to most U.S. Americans. Nonetheless, the
political
transformation that they have achieved and continue to achieve at the
national
and local levels is as important as the cultural transformation; one is
inevitably linked to the other. Ironically, even as federal programs
undoubtedly
favored Cubans in important material ways, their ascent as a community
undoubtedly
served to further other Central American and Caribbean Latinos'
self-representation in government, the media, and public space. While
much of
U.S. Cold War policy in their home countries might have backfired, the
unexpected creation of new Latino communities in the U.S. that resulted
from
this policy clearly strengthened U.S. democracy at home and affirmed
the right
of all members of our society to pursue justice, freedom, and their own
American dreams.

Lillian Guerra,
Ph.D., is the author of many scholarly essays as well as three books, Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico; The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba; and Visions of Power: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance in Cuba, 1959-1971. Her creative writings include contributions to the works of renowned photographers Alex Harris and Cathryn Griffith, as well as two collections of Spanish-language poetry, one published in Quito, Ecuador, and the other in Havana, Cuba. The daughter of Cuban exiles who came to the United States in 1965, she has lived, researched, and taught courses in Cuba over the course of 38 visits in the last 15 years. From 1996 to 1998, Dr. Guerra lived in Cuba for the first time and in addition to researching her dissertation, she came to know more than a hundred close relatives in Cienfuegos, Havana, and Pinar del Río. Dr. Guerra taught Latin American history at Bates College for four years and Caribbean history at Yale University for six years. She is currently an Associate Professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida, Gainesville. A graduate of Dartmouth College, she received her Ph.D. degree in History from the University of Wisconsin.

Endnotes

[1]Susan
Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cubans Changed the U.S. and
Their
Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009), 23-39; 70-87.

[7]María
Cristina García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico,
the
United States, and Canada (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2006),
110.

[8]Joshua E.S. Phillips, "The Case Against the Generals," The Washington Post (17 August 2003),
W-06.

[9]Information
on the concentration of these and other ethnic groups may be found on
the U.S.
Census Bureau's "American Factfinder"
website at:
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml To replicate the data in
the table found in
this essay go to the American Factfinder website and follow the steps
below:

·
Click
on Geographies-Metropolitan Statistical Area/select
Microstatistical area 2010/select "All Metropolitan and Micropolitan
Statistic Areas within the United States and Puerto Rico." [click "Add
to your selection," Close]
·
Click
on Topics/select People/select Population Change/select
Migration (Previous Residence) [Close]
·
Click
on People/Type
in a race, ancestry, or tribe
[e.g. Dominican, Salvadoran, Cuban, etc.] and click "Go"/Population
Group Name [select group, click Add, Close]
·
Select
table
BO7204
"Geographical Mobility Within the Past Year for Current
Residence—State,
County and Place level in the United States"/select View Table

For
the group selected, the above table
gives the total population for the largest 90-180 U.S. cities to
include
information on migration. It should be noted that these numbers are
derived
from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey and are current
estimates based on both the 10-year U.S. Census and the Bureau's annual
surveys.

[10]Gilbert
Joseph, "What We Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More
Meaningfully into Cold War Studies" in In From the Cold: Latin
America's
New Encounter with the Cold War, edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniela
Spenser
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 11-15.

[13]Stephen
G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of
Anticommunism
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) and The
Most
Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist
Revolution in
Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1999); John
H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and
the
Colossus (Twayne Publishers, 1994; Walter LaFeber, Inevitable
Revolutions: The
United States in Central America, 2nd ed. (W.W. Norton, 1993.

[14]Morley,
Morris H., Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba,
1952-1986) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Lars Schoultz,
That
Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban
Revolution
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

[19]Thomas
G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of
the Cuban
Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

[20]Don
Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations against Cuba,
1959-1965
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006); Morris Morley and Chris
McGillion, eds. Cuba, the
United
States, and the Post-Cold War World: The International Dimensions of
the
Washington-Havana Relationship
(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005).

[22]Thomas
O'Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America (Albuquerque,
NM:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Paul J. Dosal, Doing Business
with the
Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944
(New
York: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 1995); Lester D. Langley, The
Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America,
1880-1930
(Lexington,
KY: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1995).

[23]Jason
M. Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race and U.S. Expansion
in
Central America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Stephen
Striffler
and Mark Mobert, eds., Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in
the
Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

[25]Knut
Walter, The
Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936-1956 (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Eric Roorda. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor
Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945
(Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998).

[26]Stephen
Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American
Coup in
Guatemala (Harvard University Press, 1999); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered
Hope:
The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton,
NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991).

[34]As
Elizabeth Jean Wood summarizes this process, "The Salvadoran civil war
was, at the macro level, a struggle between classes. The long-standing
oligarchic alliance of the economic elite and the military led to a
highly
unequal society in which the great majority of Salvadorans were
excluded from
all but the most meager life opportunities. The response of this
oligarchic
alliance to the social movements of the 1970s and their demands for
economic
reform and political inclusion was repression, not compromise." See
Wood,
Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York:
Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 11.

[69]In
1988, a federal district judge found the INS guilty of discriminating
against
Salvadorans and favoring automatic deportation in order to serve U.S.
foreign
policy. A year later, evidence also emerged of collaboration between
the INS
and Salvadoran security forces in covering up the military's
assassination of
six Jesuits priests, their cook and her daughter. See "Judge Tells U.S.
to
Stop Coercion of Salvadorans Seeking Asylum," The
New York Times (1 May 1988) A1; "Why Apologize for El
Salvador?" The New York Times (25
December 1989), 1: 30; "Asylum for the Abusers," The
Washington Post (14 June 1999), A21.

[73]If the Mango Could Speak: A
Documentary
about Children and War in Central America, directed by
Patricia Goudvis
(New Jersey: New Day Films, 1993); Michael Wessells, Child Soldiers:
From
Violence to Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006),
31-35.

[74]Tom
Hayden, "Peace is Breaking Out Among Salvadoran Gang Members," The Nation (14 May 2012),
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/167875/peace-breaking-out-among-salvadoran-gang-members.

[79]Reed
Johnson, "Salvaging El Salvador: A Week of Multimedia Events in LA
brings
the country's murky past out of the shadows," Los
Angeles Times (23 October 2009), D1.

[80]Frank
Shyong, "LA Salvadoran Community Sees Hope Along a New Corridor," Los Angeles Times (9 September 2012), latimes.com/news/local/la-me-salvadorans-20120910,0,7437736.story

The
views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the
authors and
should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of
the U.S.
Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not
constitute
their endorsement by the U.S. Government.